Enterprise Search

Today's Search Term: Term Density

'Term density' is a calculated percentage of how frequently a term appears in a document, relative to the overall size of the document. This fixes the problem with simple term frequency calculations. For example, if a word appears 5 times in a 2 page document and 10 times in document a 100 page document, the first document is probably still more relevant, even though it has 5 less occurrences of the term.

From the New Idea Engineering Glossary of Search-Related Terms

 

 

 

  

 

Today's Search Term: Stemming

stemming

Related Terms:  lemmatization, normalize
Search engines use stemming as a means to determine the root of a given written word. Using a program or algorithm all of the affixes to a word (prefix and /or suffix in the English language) are removed, leaving the root word. By implementing the rules of the given language obstacles such as third- person singular present (as cries is of the verb cry) in the English language can be accurately indexed.

Stemmers become harder to design as the rules of the target language becomes more complex. For example, some languages have more verb and pronoun forms. Other languages do not always have clear word breaks between each word, and you can't do stemming until you've isolated the words!

 

Search Terms

NIE maintains a Glossary Enterprise Search Terms related to the Business and Technology of Search on our site, which you can browse at your convenience. This is an active list, and we welcome your suggestions and additions!

Now we're going to select and post one of these each day or so in the blog. Some may be familiar but we hope some will be new to you. Enjoy!

Today's Search Term: Folksonomy

Folksonomy

Related Terms:  Taxonomy, Behavior Based Taxonomy
A type of taxonomy or other organization of content  suggested by users.

For example, on popular photo sites, users can tag photos with descriptive words. These words can then be searched for. In the enterprise, some search systems allow employees to tag certain documents with key words. These terms are then found when other employees search for those terms.